By Becket Adams
Sunday, May 04, 2025
It didn’t take long for members of the press to pivot
from acknowledging the industry-wide failure to cover Joe Biden’s mental and
physical decline to asserting indignantly their total innocence in the scandal.
The way some in the press now tell it, journalists were
not intentionally dishonest or complicit in the cover-up; they only erred in
trusting the former president too much. The way others tell it, the press merely “missed” what casual Twitter/X users could see as plain as
day.
There was no industry-wide effort to downplay, excuse, or
deny Biden’s decline, others insist, arguing further that only a few Democratic
hacks ever vouched for the former president’s mental acuity. This is by far the
most egregious defense offered on behalf of the news media, and it comes from
former Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd.
“I just refuse to accept this stupid premise because it’s
a right-wing-manufactured, right-wing premise in order to stain the media,”
Todd said during a recent interview with former CNN pundit Chris Cillizza.
The former NBC anchor added, with regard to the pundits
he blames, “The media’s got plenty of things to attack them for, and there are
MSNBC and CNN and pundits that absolutely carried water for Joe Biden, but
they’re not journalists. They’re former strategists that carried water for Joe
Biden.”
The funny thing about journalism is that reporters tend
to write things down, meaning we have receipts — lots of them. And when it
comes to the concerted effort to allay voters’ concerns about Biden’s age, the
receipts show that media participation went well beyond remarks from the odd
Democratic pundit or anchor. The campaign to protect Biden was supported by
entire newsrooms, by straight news journalists, and by so-called fact-checkers.
Probably the most damning example of this came in 2024,
just before Biden’s disastrous debate. The White House was claiming that the
mountain of videos showing him struggling to articulate simple sentences and
perform basic physical tasks were merely “cheap fakes,” that is, footage edited
unfairly to give the appearance of senility.
News media wasted no time in mainstreaming the White
House narrative and the term “cheap fakes,” even though the evidence went the
other way, showing that many such videos had not been altered in any way. (Nothing
in these
videos, for instance, has been
manipulated or edited.)
Nevertheless, news organizations such as the Associated
Press claimed that footage showing a dazed-looking Biden being led by the hand
of former President Obama at a fundraising event in Los Angeles was not what it
appeared to be. Obama merely wanted to appear “chummy,” the AP reported, citing
a lone anonymous source. A spokesperson for the Democratic surrogate who
moderated the fundraiser likewise said it was “nonsense” to suggest that Biden
froze. This was good enough for the AP to publish a “fact-check” in its “FACT FOCUS” vertical.
George Clooney, who headlined the dinner, later claimed
in a bombshell New York Times opinion article that it was at this event
that he realized Biden was no longer the man everyone knew as vice president
and senator.
Speaking of the AP, it was White House correspondent Will
Weissert who teed up Biden’s press secretary during the short-lived “cheap
fakes” narrative with the following: “There seems to be a rash of videos that
have been edited to make the president appear especially frail or mentally
confused. I’m wondering if the White House is especially worried about the fact
that this appears to be a pattern that we’re seeing more of?”
Responded Karine Jean-Pierre, who was likely thankful for
such a helpful question, “They are cheap fakes video. They are done in bad
faith.”
She added, “Instead of talking about the president’s
performance in office, and what I mean by that is his legislative wins, what
he’s been able to do for the American people across the country, we’re seeing
these deep fakes, these manipulated videos, and it is again, done in bad
faith.”
The Washington Post decried the supposed
preponderance of “cheap fakes” on social media, claiming such content had
“become staples of Republican attacks against Biden.”
CBS News published a primer news article titled, “What
are cheap fakes?”
Biden fell “victim to a simpler version of ‘deepfakes,’”
the news network explained, focusing on footage from the gathering of world
leaders in which Biden ambled away from the group, who had just watched a
skydiving demonstration, to gab with some of the skydivers. Two versions of the
scene made the rounds: one that showed the skydivers and one that didn’t. The
White House pointed to the video that included the skydivers as exculpatory
evidence, arguing that Biden merely wanted to say hello to them. Critics were
not convinced, as the president’s simply wandering away from the delegation of
world leaders seemed more befitting of a child with attention-span issues than
the leader of the world’s nuclear superpower. Both versions of the videos also
showed a man seemingly disconnected, slow, stiff, and confused about his
surroundings.
Given what we know now, who do you suppose was closer to
the truth? The critics who pointed to the video or CBS? (Humorously enough, in
its defense of Biden’s behavior and its attack on “cheap fakes,” CBS originally
included in its article the raw footage shared by the White House and labeled
it “digitally altered video.” CBS later replaced that footage with the tightly
cropped version, labeled “edited video.”)
At Todd’s former place of employment, NBC News reporters
worked tirelessly to produce articles with headlines such as “Conservative
media uses misleading camera angle of Biden to falsely claim that he was
wandering aimlessly,” “Misleading GOP videos of Biden are going viral — The
fact-checks have trouble keeping up,” and “The deceptive Biden G7 video was
quickly debunked, but it kept going viral anyway.”
Reuters went with “Fact Check: Clip of Biden ‘wandering
off’ at G7 summit lacks context.”
The Poynter Institute journalism school published an
article before the June 2024 debate titled “‘Cheap fake’ videos, and the phrase itself,
take 2024 election’s center stage.” The subhead added, “‘Cheap fake’ videos of
Biden that have been selectively edited or taken out of context have flooded
social media and are the subject of political spin.”
PolitiFact also adopted the term to dismiss video
and photographic evidence of Biden’s decline. “‘Cheap fakes’: Viral videos keep
clipping Biden’s words out of context,” read one February 14, 2024,
headline.
In June of that year, PolitiFact was still at:
“Donald Trump’s supporters have pushed deceptively edited videos of President
Joe Biden to cast doubt on his mental and physical fitness. Now, the two
campaigns are putting their own political spin on the definition of ‘cheap
fake’ videos.” It deemed such videos “a common tactic to undermine Biden’s
fitness for office as the 81-year-old seeks reelection,” helpfully adding that
“former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is 78.” (PolitiFact’s
examples include the videos of Biden wandering off during the G-7 summit and
having to be led off stage during the L.A. fundraiser.)
And then came the June 27 presidential debate, during
which the façade that Biden and his allies had constructed to persuade voters
he was fit for a second term in the Oval Office crumbled and crashed. The
“cheap fake” conversation died nearly as quickly as it had begun.
Yet, even after all this, the New York Times and
other outlets continued to cover the Biden White House as a perpetual
victim of Republican conspiracies.
“For years, far-right commentators have floated a
conspiracy theory that Democratic Party elites were secretly plotting to
replace President Biden on the ticket — a switcheroo that could give the party
an advantage in November,” the Times reported in a July news blurb.
Biden dropped out of the race that same month following
an intense pressure campaign from Democratic leadership.
Where does this leave us?
CBS News, NBC News, Reuters, the Associated Press, PolitiFact,
Poynter, and others immediately jumped on the “cheap fakes” bandwagon,
attempting to convince voters that the evidence of Biden’s decline was
untrustworthy. They adopted the narrative, even using the White House’s
preferred terminology, with no regard for whether it aligned with what was
plainly true.
But we can give Todd credit for making one excellent
point: Democrats who are now paid network commentators and anchors also tried
to cover up Biden’s deterioration. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
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